Many parties publish portable electronic documents, such as Flash Paper documents or Adobe Acrobat documents using tools such as Flash Paper commercially available from Macromedia, Inc., of San Francisco, Calif., or the conventional Acrobat product commercially available from Adobe Systems, Inc., of San Jose, Calif. However, the security features of such products have been limited to restricting the opening of documents to users who have a password. A user who may use many documents from different sources thus may not only have to enter the password for each document, but the user will have to remember many passwords. This manner of protecting documents is cumbersome for the recipients of the documents. An author of a portable electronic document who wishes to limit access to the document is thus forced to choose between: not restricting access only to authorized users, but making the access procedure for authorized users easier for them, or restricting access, but making the access procedure for authorized users more cumbersome.
Users are used to being able to access documents anywhere, which may have been one of the reasons that the existing system of password protection has become prevalent. It would be desirable if any solution to the problem described above allowed a document to be used anywhere. Security solutions that would require a user to be in a certain location to view a document would not allow users elsewhere to access the document, frustrating users and making the solution to the above problems seem like it was a step backwards.
Although access to a portable electronic document can be restricted until an authorized user opens the document, an authorized user can make the document available to one or more unauthorized users, for example, by printing the document and then providing it to any number of unauthorized users. Although the document, once provided in this manner, is no longer secure, it can be desirable to identify the authorized user who made the document available to the one or more unauthorized users, in order to protect the security of other documents that can then be withheld from that user.
What is needed is a system and method that can protect the security of a portable electronic document without requiring all the users of the document to remember a password, that allows access to the document from various locations, and can identify a party that breaches the security of a portable electronic document.